WILL Leather Goods

Driving Sales Through User Experience Design

Founded in 1981 in Eugene, Oregon by William Adler, Will® Leather Goods is a leading American men and women’s lifestyle brand recognized internationally for its use of high quality, handcrafted materials and excellent workmanship.

Matching Online Experience With Offline Experience

Will Leather Goods’ handcrafted leather bags, belts and accessories have a highly-crafted lifestyle brand presence in their brick-and-mortar stores. They wanted their online customers’ e-commerce experience to complement the in-store experience their store visitors were accustomed to. They also wanted new customers to discover Will by offering a visually appealing online introduction to the brand.

Aligning Front-end Design With UX Direction

Will Leather Goods originally approached Subtext to provide quick-turnaround interim changes to their site in order to simplify the overall shopping experience for their customers. In our discovery phase, Subtext identified and provided front-end updates to the previous site that immediately increased traffic and conversions.“We did more [online] sales in the 6 months after the launch than we did in all of the prior year,” noted Alison Hiatt, Director of Marketing at Will Leather Goods. The WLG team worked in tandem with Subtext to provide UX consulting that guided design on a digital interface and elegantly married their handcrafted, brand feel with the functionality needed of a full-service, responsive e-commerce site.

Expertly Handcrafted E-commerce Experience

The design and flow of the new WLG site was the result of a thoroughly collaborative effort between the WLG team and the Subtext team. For every page designed by WILL Leather Goods, Subtext provided UX recommendations for efficient, easy user flow throughout the site. Another area of focus was to make sure design elements were created with a responsive experience in mind. There were a number of custom design elements in the site, which brought a unique set of challenges to designing a responsive layout. To resolve these challenges both teams worked together to produce a custom solution that provided a fully responsive, robust experience on any device, without losing any of the visually compelling design elements found throughout the site.